“Physical?” Sharadza said. “Do you mean there are other dangers we must risk?”
“Certainly,” I told her. “The danger to our spirit-selves is limited, but ever-present. The spirit is the eternal core of our being. It can neither be created nor destroyed, although it can be drastically altered, captured, or consigned to unending torment. That is why we must go together, four spirits to represent the four elements of the living world. There is strength in numbers. We will endure the journey by combining our powers, and our ability to sway Udgrond to our cause will be that much greater.”
“I remember this name,” said Alua. Pieces of her previous existence, and the many lives that preceded it, had been returning gradually. “From the long Ages of Blood and Fire… When we were new to this world. I remember fearing him, yet I do not know why.”
“There were many who feared him,” I said. “For his wrath was great, and his fury shook the world. While his brethren walked the world playing games of creation and destruction with the young races, he tore apart continents and flooded the great chasms to create oceans. He was the wildest of the Old Breed, and his nature was never tempered by involvement with mortal beings. Some say he devoured entire worlds in his youth, long before this one came to our attention.”
“If this Udgrond is so fierce and untamed,” asked Sharadza, “why seek him at all?”
She was clever, my lovely apprentice. I was as proud of her intellect as I was annoyed by the question. “Because he has power that even Zyung will respect and fear,” said Iardu. “And he has lain so long at the world’s heart that his will must have weakened. I believe that with your help I can shape his thoughts into a pattern that will serve our goals.”
“And make him a weapon to wield against the God-King,” said Vaazhia.
“Not a weapon,” I said. “An ally. This is our last chance to increase our strength before we must face Zyung. We must not fail.”
I begin the ancient song, my voice rising to fill the locked chamber. The indigo flame leaps at the circle’s midpoint. The voices of my three companions join with mine, a swirl of chanted harmony. A four-part mantra rises from our throats as our spirits must rise from our bodies. Our short practice has served us well. The chant continues, revolving upon itself like the turning of the world-sphere. The chamber fades beneath the rising light of the mystic flame.
There is no moment of jarring release, no sudden cleaving of form and spirit. Our souls simply rise, borne on the melodies ringing from our throats. The song continues until all four of us float above our prone bodies, looking upon our circle of power. At my mental cue, our disembodied wills cause our empty forms to cease the chanting.
We hover at the invisible gateway to astral regions now, seeing the world beyond the chamber as an interlocking pattern of bright auras. Seething colors without names or physical analogues revolve about us. The veil of material existence has been torn aside. We swim freely among the vapors of creation, as fish navigate the glimmering sea.
“So beautiful…” Sharadza’s gaze lifts beyond the world to the miracle of celestial space, where planets and stars and galaxies glide and twirl, beckoning all of us into the infinite.
“No,” I tell her in the wordless voice of a spirit. “We must go down… inward… not up and outward. Time enough later to explore the wonders of the universe. We seek the heart of the earth, my friends.” I take their hands in mine, although none of us have hands in this form. It is our spirits that are linked, not our bodies. “This way…”
I lead them downward, through the solid rock of the floor, into the root of the island itself. Crystalline lights sparkle about us, the souls of stone and mineral and raw earth. We sink deeper, leaving the vast ocean and the tiny island above us. I lead them through vast caverns of quartz and shale and diamond. We descend through leagues of solid earth, four motes of light coursing through a world of lights. There is no darkness on this level of reality, only overlapping fields of intelligence, seas of atom and wave, the essence of the world’s bones.
“All matter is an illusion,” I remind them. “Nothing is truly solid. The only true reality is awareness, filtered and redefined by perception.”
Great vaults of magma open before us, and we descend through liquid fires that blind us with their heat. We move faster, flying through pockets of molten earth, layers of magnetic energy, fields of frozen potential, caverns full of eyeless, pale things that scrabble and breed in the unbroken dark. Phantoms of living fire surge from molten seas, leviathans of flame with bones of liquid metal. We dive deeper, heading toward the heart of it all, the hub of supernal gravity and ultimate pressure that is the core of the earth itself.